When Ingmar Bergman wrote the script for his six-part, five-hour miniseries Scenes From a Marriage in 1973, his wife told him that it was far too personal to connect with a wide audience. She was right about its specificity, but wrong about its appeal — when the show premiered on Scandinavian television it was a smash hit, leaving the streets deserted every night that it was on. Bergman re-edited the material into a feature film of around half the length for theatrical distribution in the United States, where it became a hit on the art house circuit on the heels […]
by Jim Hemphill on Sep 14, 2018To finish off 2016, I’d like to round up some of the year’s best Blu-ray releases that I didn’t get a chance to cover in my weekly column. It was an exceptional year for physical media thanks to labels like Criterion, Twilight Time, Arrow, Kino Lorber, and Olive, all of which continue to license neglected titles from studio vaults and give them the first-class treatments they deserve. While the list below barely scratches the surface of the efforts of these companies and others, it contains what I consider to be the most essential discs of the year — movies that […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 30, 2016